Transformers: Age of Extinction AKA Dinotronic Jamboree

I had a really good record of not watching the Transformers movies. I saw the first one a while back and surprisingly enough, I actually liked it. It was over the top, it had giant robots, it was worth a few yucks.

And then I saw that they were coming out with a sequel to that movie and I never got around to seeing it. And then I heard horrible things about those sequels and I actively stayed away from them. The two sequels to the first Transformers movie are thought to be down right awful and I had no interest in seeing them.

And then I saw the trailer for Dinotronic Jamboree. And I actually got a little bit interested.

I mean yeah, it still looked stupid, it didn't really look like it had any redeeming qualities about it, but at the same time, it just looked like a giant dumb robot movie. It had Mark Wahlberg, Shia LaBeouf was not longer in the movies.

It had Optimus Prime riding a dinosaur transformer!

It had all the explosions and action that could make for just a fun dumb action movie that sometimes you just like to see. And I don't think I was in the minority for this.

The trailer came out and while everyone in the back of their minds knew this movie was going to be just as shitty as the last movies, we all bought into it the same way. We all went to go see this movie and it ended up making over 200 million dollars at the box office.

I mean yeah, the movie was critically panned as one of the worst movies of 2014 but you know that won't stop good ol' Michael Bay.

If you're wondering what that magical trailer was like, I'll leave it here. Again, its nothing incredible, you can probably guess that the movie is going to suck, but at the same time it does incite a little bit of curiosity, at least it did for me.

So in the aftermath of a battle in Chicago... I guess it might have been something that happened in the last movie or something, the Transformers are outcasts actually being secretly hunted by the United States government. Which in itself, is actually a decent idea.

I know not everyone is a huge fan of Kelsey Grammer but I actually really enjoy him. He just happens to chose a the sequel in most franchises that seem to be the worst. Expendables, X-men, and now Transformers, even though there weren't that high of standards to begin with.

But anyway, its a decent idea that the US government is trying to hunt down the Transformers. I'm not totally sure how it connects to the rest of the franchise but I really like the idea.

Anyway, the US government is hunting down the Decepticon but have been secretly hunting down ALL transformers, including Optimus Prime and all the autobots from the rest of the franchise.

And I think it would have been enough to have the humans just hunting down and waging war on the Transformers in this movie... but alas, this movie decided that just wasn't enough and decided to add a lot of bullshit to make a TWO AND A HALF HOUR LONG MOVIE!!!

Anyway...

Enter Mark Wahlberg. Yeah he has a character name but to be honest, I really have no idea what it was. On top of that, he's playing Mark Wahlberg. He's suppose to be an "inventor" from Texas and he just sounds like a guy from Boston. I'm not saying that's all Mark Wahlberg is but if I can't believe that he's from Texas and I can't believe that he's an inventor, I'm just gonna call him what he is, and that's Mark Wahlberg.

But hey, that's not that bad. Who wouldn't want to see what happens when the transformers work with Mark Wahlberg?

Anyway, Mark Wahlberg is an "inventor" and he is having trouble making ends meet. His 17 year old daughter, (played by that shitty actress from The Last Airbender, Nicola Peltz) is about to graduate and she is worried about leaving him and she's worried about paying for college.

Now... I'm just gonna say it. These two are just the worst.

I'm realizing something very quickly and that is the fact that these two, and a lot of the characters in the rest of the movie just remind me of the characters from Sharknado.

Wahlberg is obviously one of the best of all the actors, but he's pulling out happening style acting in this and its just down right awful. And his daughter is just the worst.

I'll talk more about the daughter and one of the worst parts of the movie, but I'll talk about it more later.

Anyway, as Marky Mark is doing his "inventor" thing, he comes across an old wrecked semi truck and decides to bring it back to his "lab". He soon realizes that the semi is not just any old truck, it is in fact the leader of the autobots, Optimus Prime.

The government comes after him and they want to take Optimus Prime in. They of course get away and... well then I'm not totally sure what happens after that.

The story was actually kind of coherent up until the point where they escape with Optimus Prime. Yeah it wasn't exactly the greatest acting or performances from... anybody, but it did have a story and it was a good starting act in what probably should have been an hour and half long movie. Instead after that point the movie still had 2 HOURS left!!

Unfortunately, the US government is utilizing the services of a group of transformer mercenaries. These transformers come from the transformer homeworld and... I guess they killed off the dinosaurs?

On top of that, you've got Stanley Tucci who plays the head of a company that is working with the US government, taking the remains of the autobots they kill and recreating their genetic material to create their own transformers...?? I guess. And then on top of that the transformers that they created have the souls of Megatron and the evil Decepticon... I guess...

And then the Transformer mercenaries have their own motivations and the government have their own plots with Stanley Tucci and his company and eventually it just gets really confusing why they're doing anything that they're doing.

Oddly enough, the thing that they explain the most in the movie is this really kind of creepy explanation for why Mark Wahlberg's daughter who is a minor is able to date a 20 year old.

Now this has been a complaint of almost everyone I've seen review this movie and for good reason.

In essence, the movie takes a tactical pause to introduce her race car driving boyfriend who "just got picked up by Red Bull" and explains that their romance isn't creepy because they fall under a Texas statute called "The Romeo and Juliet Law", a law that says that if a relationship begins while two people are underage and one of them becomes a legal adult, its totally cool for them to have a sexual relationship.

Now you may be saying, Connor, this is a pretty small criticism of the movie, yeah its a little bit creepy (no, no, its REALLY creepy) but it can't be THAT huge of an issue for the movie.

But it really is.

The daughter and the boyfriend are two of the top characters and we're suppose to like them. And that's a little bit hard when this incredibly creepy relationship is just kind of sidestepped and by the end of the movie, Mark Wahlberg is just kind of cool with it.

And I mentioned before that the characters are pretty much the cast of Sharknado. And this is really brought on by the performance of the dumbass boyfriend (played by Jack Reynor).

I really think that this guy was an Irish actor who just couldn't get his American accent down so they took another five minutes out of the movie to explain why he has an Irish accent instead of actually forwarding the plot.

And you're probably wondering, why am I focusing so much on the human characters, isn't this a movie about Transformers?

And you know what, I actually thought the same thing while I was watching this movie. For some reason these movies think that while its easier to have the relatable characters be the humans, the action should be focused on them, and not the Transformers.

I get it, make the main character human, you have a relatable tie to the audience and how their reaction would be to working with a small building sized robot. But first off, the acting isn't good enough for that, so why? And second, you know you have a problem when the fighting of the Transformers is done in the back ground. A lot of the shots of the Transformers fighting is done with Mark Wahlberg or Airbender girl just looking dumb into the camera.

Think about it this way. The plot of Pacific Rim was focused on the humans but at the same time the action was focused on the robots destroying aliens. The majority of the shots of the action sequences were on the robots fighting the aliens and not the humans in the cockpit controlling the robots.

And while I wasn't in love with Pacific Rim, at least the cinematography in that movie made it seem like they actually gave a shit. There would be times in this movie where some transformers would go run towards each other like they're going to fight, then it would switch to one of the human characters and suddenly the transformers would be in the middle of a fight.

The weird thing is that for a franchise that Michael Bay won't let die, he really doesn't seem to give a shit on whether or not it looks good or not. He doesn't really seem to give a shit on if the characters are likable, if they can act, or if they even do things that make any sense.

As long as there are explosions in every. other. scene. Michael Bay seems to have just said, "looks good to me" and sent it to the final movie.

And the weird part is the fact that this movie is 2 AND A HALF HOURS!!! Have I mentioned that?

I don't think I've ever seen a movie go for that long and have that little effort put into it. Its really kind of amazing.

The ending is basically the same ending from the first Transformers and I'm not even sure who the main villain is, whether its Megatron (or Galvatron or whatever the hell that was) or the bounty hunter transformer or Kelsey Grammer. And the movie decides that, instead of getting done as quickly as possible, they want to drag out these fight scenes, as long as they can possibly go.

And the ending explains why this movie wasn't actually called Dinotronic Jamboree like I thin it should have.

Listen, I'm not a Transformers fan. I know people who grew up with this franchise and they know all the names of all the characters and all the Transformers that ever existed. And that's cool. Apparently, when the trailer came out, everyone freaked out because there was a dinosaur transformer in the movie. I personally didn't care who this dinosaur transformer was, I just know that I thought it was really damn cool to see Optimus Prime riding a fucking dinosaur transformer.

I'm going to tell you, the trailer of this movie lied to us all. There are no dinosaurs in this movie.

I mean... there are... for about 5 minutes...

And are they cool?

I mean... I guess. But by the time the dinosaurs show up, I just don't really care. I'm basically just begging for this piece of garbage to just end.

And that's the bottom line of this film. Its a 2 and a half hour long example of what happens when a director just does not put in any effort at all.

What's insane about this movie is that as hard as it is to believe, this movie had some things right. Things that would have made a pretty good Transformers movie. I think a war between Transformers and humans is a really interesting idea. I think humans creating their own transformers to fight the real ones is a really interesting idea. I think dinosaur transformers are a really kickass idea. I think Optimus Prime riding a transformer dinosaur is a really good idea. Hell, I even think having Mark Wahlberg in a Transformers movie is a good idea. But the way that this movie was executed was just horrible and made this movie really unbearable and make me almost feel like I was watching Sharknado or a really bad sci fi channel movie. And the weird part is, there's a lot of parts of this movie that makes it feel like a satire rather than an actual movie. Which hell, if you wanna make a satire of action movies, or hell even the Transformers franchise in general, go ahead. But choose whether or not its going to be a serious movie or a satire.

There really aren't enough words to really give this movie the shit it deserves. Its really that bad. While there are things that this movie could have done to be better, this movie gets absolutely nothing right and is just a down right horrible movie at the end of the day. It doesn't deserve a time of the 200 million dollars it actually got.

But of course, that's just my opinion. What did you think of Transformers: Dinotronic Jamboree? Did you like it? Do you think that Dinotronic Jamboree is a better title for the movie than Age of Extinction? I think so. Comment and Discuss below! You can also follow me on Twitter @cmhaugen24 in order to give me your own shit on this movie and any other thoughts you have. You can also send me requests for future reviews and get updates on future movie news and reviews on this blog.

I'll leave you with this. This is a video giving a slight explanation on why Michael Bay might actually be a genius. Perhaps they have a point. Enjoy!